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In the Panther-Lair.com 3-2-1 Column: recruiting, what should be, Capel’s wins and losses and a lot more.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

The big one is coming
We’ve got a new annual recruiting event to look forward to.

In the past, there was Signing Day, of course. That’s an obvious one, and it’s right there on the calendar well ahead of time. They added a second Signing Day, too, which turned out to be the new first Signing Day, except the old Signing Day, which is now the second Signing Day, wasn’t really called the first Signing Day since it was the only Signing Day, and nobody called World War I the first world war when it was happening because they never thought there’d be a second, just like nobody thought there’d be a second Signing Day, which turned out to be the new first Signing Day, except the old Signing Day, which is now the second Signing Day, wasn’t really called the first Signing Day since it was the only -

Sorry. I got stuck in a loop there, like the needle skipping on my old vinyl recording of “Going Up the Country.” Love me some Canned Heat.

Anyway, Signing Day(s) is/was a locked-in date and something we know is coming on a specific day every year. But in terms of annual recruiting events, there’s more than just that/those. Because Pat Narduzzi’s staff has, over the last four years, taken the approach of trying to identify one primary weekend for official visits and then load up that weekend with as many top targets as possible.

It started in December 2015, when Narduzzi and company hosted seven uncommitted targets. They followed that with six uncommitted targets on the second weekend of December in 2016. Things were a little more spread out the next year, but on the first weekend of December, with the first edition of the new Signing Day two weeks away, they brought in top targets Shocky Jacques-Louis, Tyler Bentley and Jeshaun Jones.

Then came 2018 and the new spring official visit period. For the first time, coaches could bring recruits to campus on official visits in April, May and June. There are good and bad points to this change in the recruiting schedule, but coaches quickly realized that they needed a game plan for the new visit period, regardless of how much they complained about it.

Pitt’s staff decided its approach would be to load up on one gigantic weekend in June, and they did just that, putting together the biggest official visit weekend I’ve ever seen to produce the most commitments in a single day probably in forever.

18 official visitors and nine commitments that weekend alone (one on Saturday night and eight on Sunday), making for a very busy Father’s Day if you were trying to report on all the news. It was insanity. It was chaos. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together.

(Editor’s note: For future reference, just assume you have the proper wording of a Bill Murray quote, because if you start looking up the quote, you’re going to fall down a rabbit hole of Murray-isms that will consume your day.)

The big official visit weekend last year got pretty nuts, and if what we’ve learned so far is any indication, the staff is looking to do it again. June 14-16 is shaping up to be the Big Weekend this year; we’ve already confirmed multiple visitors for that weekend - including some top prospects - and the list will surely grow by the time mid-June arrives.

Heck, last year the list kept growing even after the weekend ended; I don’t think we confirmed Jason Collier as a visitor (or knew of him as a recruit) until a few days into the week after the visit. So circle that date on your calendar, because Father’s Day is probably going to be a wild one again.

Some immediate help
Jeff Capel got some good recruiting news this week when JUCO guard Ryan Murphy announced his commitment. Murphy is something of a recent target for the Pitt staff, having gotten his offer last week and committing without even visiting Pittsburgh.

The 6’2” guard is known as a shooter, a reputation he presumably developed at Calabasas High School three years ago (as well as several New England private schools prior to that) before going to UNC-Charlotte in the summer of 2016. He redshirted for a year and then had a pretty good redshirt freshman season for the 49ers, highlighted by a late-January game against Old Dominion when he scored 27 points on 9-of-11 shooting and 6-6 from beyond the arc.

Those are good numbers. But then he left Charlotte and went to New Mexico Junior College, and I have to say, his stats at that level don’t jump off the page. This past season, he played in 13 games and made just 28 three-pointers on 100 attempts. That’s an average shooting performance of somewhere around 2-for-8 on most nights.

Now, Murphy still got his points. He led the Thunderbirds at 18.5 points per game while shooting just under 40% from the floor and 82% from the free throw line; those numbers are a great foundation. But Murphy is coming to Pitt to take - and make - deep shots. That’s what the Panthers need more than almost anything: someone to finish when Xavier Johnson and Trey McGowens drive and dish.

I know I shouldn’t read too much into JUCO stats, but Murphy’s game log for this past season includes two sets of 3-of-10’s, two 1-of-7’s, a 1-of-8, a 5-of-13 and an 0-of-5. Inside the arc, he was a 50% shooter, but the majority of his shots were from long range, so that number outside the arc - 28% - is going to need to come up, without question.

Still, there’s something to be said for Murphy getting recommended to Pitt on the word of Steph Curry; he might know a thing or two about basketball. And Murphy’s reputation seems to be stronger than the stats from the 13 games he played this season. I can’t say I’ve seen him play in person, so what do I know? I’m just a guy looking at JUCO stats, and yeah, those probably shouldn’t be the basis for too much opinion-making.

So I’m going to defer to the coaches here. Jeff Capel and company told Murphy they need him to “shoot the three ball and make shots from deep,” so they believe he can fill that role - and that role definitely exists for Pitt this season.

The Panthers were not a good three-point shooting team last year and they lost their best deep threat in the offseason, so some help was needed. Gerald Drumgoole might be able to help, but a specialist - which is what Murphy is expected to be - will get opportunities. It might be as a reserve, but that’s not the worst place to have your three-point shooter working: bring him in when you need a spark, especially when you feel good about the starters you have at guard.

Capel concerns
Of course, we can’t talk about Jeff Capel’s successes this week without talking about his misses, too. And there were two of them. First, three-star forward Olivier Robinson-Nkamhoua announced on Tuesday that he was committing to Tennessee. Robinson-Nkamhoua got an offer from Pitt in March and visited in April, but in May, he decided the Panthers were not for him.

There’s not too much shame in losing to Tennessee and Rick Barnes right now; the Volunteers are coming off a 31-win season that saw them in the top 10 all year, including a few weeks at No. 1 and a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament before they were bounced by Purdue.

Barnes has it rolling right now in Knoxville, and the surging program won out. Pitt needs a player at Robinson-Nkamhoua’s position, and that made it hurt, but it’s hard to get too worked up about losing to Tennessee at this particular point in time.

More troubling, more disappointing and more frustrating was Thursday’s news that Butler guard Ethan Morton had decided to commit to Purdue. That one stung. Morton is a local prospect, a guard who had become a focus for Capel, for obvious reasons: when a top-50 player is in your backyard, relatively speaking, you need to go after him hard and you should probably get him.

But Pitt didn’t get him. Morton went to Purdue, where Matt Painter is coming off his 14th season and his fifth consecutive trip to the NCAA Tournament (which ended in the Elite Eight). The loss of Morton hurts, for a lot of reasons. He’s a guard (Capel was expected to be able to land guards) and he’s a local (it’s a simple reality of recruiting: you have to get the locals).

There’s no easy way to spin that loss; all you can really do is try to understand it. Without being inside Morton’s head, I have to think that part of it is that Pitt’s reputation is still suffering from where the program has been the last few years.

And I think some of that has come as a surprise to fans. When Capel was hired, there were expectations of not-quite-instant-but-still-pretty-quick results on the recruiting trail, expectations that were seemingly supported by landing Johnson, McGowens and Au’Diese Toney.

If Capel could do that in a couple months, the thinking went, what could he do with a full year under his belt?

As it turns out, he can miss on guys after being on the job for a year (in addition to the guys he has landed, of course). And while getting a few ACC wins this past season gave the fan base a little excitement, I don’t think they moved the needle quite as much for recruits. Those wins were points of progress for people who follow the program closely; for those who don’t - like recruits - the program is still one that has missed three Tournaments in a row.

So how concerned are you right now? For me, I think there’s a balance between concern and hope, between thinking Capel needed to land more of his top targets than he has and allowing that it might take a little bit longer to get the program on that footing.

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

What will it take to win the Coastal?
There was a question in this week’s Panther-Lair.com Mailbag about how many wins it will take to win the Coastal Division this season, and I thought that was an interesting query.

For starters, it’s always worth keeping in mind that a different team has won the Coastal every year since the ACC expanded in 2013. Duke won it that year, followed by Georgia Tech in 2014, North Carolina in 2015, Virginia Tech in 2016, Miami in 2017 and your Pitt Panthers in 2018.

Among those six division winners, UNC had the best conference record, going a perfect 8-0 in 2015. Miami in 2017 wasn’t too far behind with a near-perfect 7-1 mark in ACC play (and you surely remember the team that posted that one loss).

The other four Coastal winners all went 6-2, and it seems to me that’s the number to shoot for if you want to win the division. In fact, the only time in the last six years that a Coastal team won at least six games and didn’t win the division was in 2015; Pitt went 6-2 that year but couldn’t compete with UNC’s perfection.

Some of this is a reflection on the parity - er, competitiveness - of the Coastal. If you’re going to win it at 6-2, that means the two teams you lost to have to lose at least three games themselves. Last year, for instance, Pitt lost to Miami and UNC, but the Hurricanes were 4-4 in the ACC and Carolina was 1-7.

So you need to win at least six games and then hope your two losses come against…the worst teams in the division?

Yeah, kind of. That’s not a bad approach. In fact, it’s one you probably need. The other option is to go 6-2 with both losses coming against the crossover opponents from the Atlantic Division. That would probably work. Virginia Tech played some of that game in 2016 when the Hokies had one of their losses come from Syracuse (the other was Georgia Tech, who was 4-4). But VT was the only one to use Atlantic losses in the cause of a Coastal title. In 2014, Georgia Tech was 6-2 but had both losses against Coastal teams - Duke, who went 5-3, and North Carolina at 4-4. And Duke did the same in 2013, losing to Georgia Tech (5-3) and Pitt (3-5).

As far as this year’s schedule and how Pitt can get to six, there’s the old standby of the four swing games. I’ve talked about this many times in the past and I’ll continue talking about it many times in the future, I’m sure. The four swing games, as I see them, are Syracuse, Georgia Tech, Virginia and Duke.

In five out of Pitt’s six seasons in the ACC, the Panthers’ record against those four opponents has more or less correlated with their overall record and their conference record. 2013 was the lone exception; that year, Pitt went 3-1 in those swing games but had a 6-6 regular season, due to being the first course in Jameis Winston’s perfect season at Florida State, sinking in a midseason disaster at Navy and giving up two punt returns to Ryan Switzer at home against North Carolina.

Otherwise, the swing game records largely line up. Pitt was 1-3 in those games in 2014 and went 6-6. In 2015 and 2016, the Panthers were 4-0 in the swing games and 8-4 overall. The Panthers stumbled to a 2-2 record in the swing games in 2017 and finished 5-7. And last year Pitt went 4-0 against those four opponents and won the Coastal (despite a seven-win regular season that suffered from a rough nonconference schedule).

It says something of Pat Narduzzi’s overall success in comparison to his predecessor that Paul Chryst went 4-4 against those four teams in two seasons and Narduzzi has gone 14-2.

Why are those the swing games? Because, quite frankly, they are games Pitt should win every year. Virginia Tech and North Carolina could potentially fit into this category as well, but I’ll put them slightly ahead of the four programs we’re talking about. If Pitt wants to be perennially at the top of the Coastal Division, the Panthers have to win those four games every year or, at worst, go 3-1. If they don’t they’ll have a hard time.

But if Pitt can win those four games, the Panthers will be almost all the way to that six-win goal with winnable contests against Virginia Tech, North Carolina (I swear, it really is a winnable game) and even Boston College, who shouldn’t be a terrible matchup, still on the table. Miami is always a challenge, but if Pitt could have produced something of an offense last year, I think the Panthers could have won.

So yes, the path to six wins is there for Pitt.

Do they really believe in Whipple?
Another one ripped from the Mailbag…

I was asked if I believe that Pitt’s offensive skill players are genuinely excited about Mark Whipple’s new offense, or whether all the positive comments we heard this spring were little more than lip service.

My answer is…both?

Look, nobody is going to go on the record bashing the new offense. Nobody is going to get in front of the microphones and tape recorders and video cameras and iPhones and say, “Well, this new system probably isn’t going to work. The concepts are simple, the checks are obvious and it’s basically a high school offense. We’ll be lucky to score 10 points in most games.”

That’s not going to happen.

Instead, you’re always going to hear about how good the new system is, about how it puts all the best players in the best positions to make their best plays, about how it’s really going to allow the team to flourish.

I know that’s what you hear because that’s what we heard two years ago at this time.

The players were learning Shawn Watson’s offense back then, going into 2017 without Nate Peterman or James Conner or Adam Bisnowaty or Dorian Johnson or Matt Canada. But it was all good. They had Max Browne. They had Qadree Ollison. They had linemen. They had Jester Weah and Quadree Henderson. And they had Shawn Watson. He worked with Teddy Bridgewater, in case you didn’t know.

We saw the results there over the course of the last two seasons. But nobody said anything publicly about any issues with the offense; in that spring and summer prior to the 2017 season, everybody was optimistic about the offense.

Just like they are right now.

After the fact, of course, there has been plenty of indication that players were frustrated with the offense, particularly last season. And some of that frustration is probably part of the reason they’re optimistic about Whipple’s offense: they have a comparison point, and when stacked up next to Watson’s scheme, they like what they see.

I think there is some genuine enthusiasm in what we heard from Pitt’s skill players this spring. They have certainly seen Whipple’s history of calling offenses: the way he develops quarterbacks, the way he gets the ball to playmakers and the overall numbers he has put up. Those things have to be encouraging. And I think as they have dug into the offense through film and spring camp, they’ve become even more convinced that it’s not just numbers on Whipple’s resume.

We’ll see what the results are, of course, and then after Whipple is gone, we’ll see what everybody says they really think about the offense. But for now, I get the impression that, yes, they’re giving lip service because that’s what you do, but there’s also something genuine behind the lip service.

JUST ONE MORE THING

A few thoughts on what should be…
- This should be Pitt’s best defensive line since Pat Narduzzi arrived - and maybe over a longer window than that. There may not be a single player who approaches the production of Ejuan Price or Aaron Donald, but as a collective group, the arrow is pointing up for this year’s defensive line. Rashad Weaver should be - and kind of has to be - one of the best edge-rushers in the ACC; he should be the anchor of the group.

On the other end, Patrick Jones should be ready to do what Weaver did last year: somewhere around five or six sacks and double-digit tackles for loss. And in the middle, you’ve got two fourth-year players who should be ready to step up to their potential - Keyshon Camp and Amir Watts - backed by a redshirt sophomore who’s as explosive as anyone in Jaylen Twyman.

The line isn’t deep and that’s going to be the main concern this season, because I’m not really sure what to expect if Pitt has to go into the depth at end, in particular. And even if injuries don’t cause it, the guys behind Weaver and Jones will have to log at least some snaps; that’s just inevitable. But as long as those five guys I mentioned - Weaver, Jones, Camp, Watts and Twyman - stay healthy, the line should be as good as it has been in quite some time.

- Along the same lines, the secondary should be the best one Narduzzi has had at Pitt.

Let’s stop and back up for a second. I know we’ve all been rather critical of the defensive backs under Narduzzi, and rightfully so: Pitt’s pass defense, especially in 2016, has not been good for the most part over the last four seasons. But it’s kind of funny to look back at those groups, because even if you hone in on the 2016 secondary, which allowed oodles of passing yards, three of the four primary starters - Jordan Whitehead, Avonte Maddox and Ryan Lewis - are all currently in the NFL.

And yet Pitt’s pass defense was routinely torched. They faced good quarterbacks, to be sure. Six of the quarterbacks the Panthers saw in 2016 were NFL Draft picks: Trace McSorley, Mason Rudolph, Mitch Trubisky, Deshaun Watson, Daniel Jones and Brad Kaaya. That included three first-round picks - Trubisky, Watson and Jones - and those six draft picks combined to throw for 2,504 yards and 16 touchdowns against Pitt in 2016.

(Edit: Pitt actually faced seven quarterbacks who were drafted, as Northwestern's Clayton Thorson was went to the Eagles in the fifth round this year. He was the Wildcats' quarterback against Pitt in the Pinstripe Bowl.)

Of course, that doesn’t excuse Jerod Evans from Virginia Tech topping 400 yards at Heinz Field that year. Nor does it explain how Zack Mahoney threw for 440 and five touchdowns in the regular-season finale either. Those numbers came against that same secondary with three NFL players (okay, technically, only two for the Duke and Syracuse games, since Whitehead was injured, but you get the point).

I digress. For as talented as that secondary ended up being - based on their pro careers, at least - this one should be better. I think Dane Jackson, Jason Pinnock and Damar Hamlin have the physical skills to be draft picks, and reserve corner Damarri Mathis probably isn’t too far behind. There’s a question mark at boundary safety, but we’ve talked about that before and if Paris Ford can live up to his potential then…

Okay, I’m going to leave that one hanging. We all know what’s at stake for Ford this season and what kind of impact he can have on the secondary and the defense. I don’t need to say it again, to be sure.

But the foundation of Hamlin, Jackson and Pinnock is as good as Pitt has had since…I’m not sure when. Probably 10+ years, I would think, assuming all three of those guys continue in their individual progress.

- So Pitt should be pretty good up front on defense and should be pretty good in the back end on defense. The linebackers are a question mark, of course, due to replacing multiple starters. And then there’s the offense, where - oh, look at the time…